I first encountered Victorian spirit photography at the 2005 Metropolitan Museum show. At the time, I found the images amusingly stagy and fantastically faked.

Spirit photography was an important development within bereavement rituals of the early 1860s. Spirit photographs are portraits that visually reunite the bereaved with the wispy reappearance of their ...

Victorian society clearly had an appetite for Dickens’ warm-hearted wisdom. A Christmas Carol was a smashing success , selling out its first run of 6,000 copies by Christmas Eve. It has never ...

Y’know, what with cellphones being pretty much universal in modern first-world America, having a camera in your pocket at all times, you’d think we would have solved a good chunk of the questions ...

Photography has always had a relationship to haunting as it shows not what is, but what once was. The process whereby light must bounce off the subject and back towards the camera suggests that ...

Mumler was soon charging Bostonians $10 to have their portrait taken alongside their dearly departed (or some likeness of). The origin story of his first spirit photograph grew embellished: the ...

These techniques include using forced perspective for giant or tiny subjects, various methods of “spirit photography”, photographing split images of the same person, pinhole cameras, security cameras ...